Grundilla Lee had heard that the town of Xanadu was a land of opportunity. The city's chief export was movies, and it had the big production companies, sound stages, movie sets, actors, and everything else that goes with it.

What the city did not have was good medical care, and that was Grundilla's specialty. She saw great promise in the market for medical services.

Even more important to her, there was the chance that she might hook a rich movie star to help raise her only child. With stars in her eyes, she moved to Xanadu with her teenage daughter, Lorelei.

She quickly established herself in the community and it was not long before she attracted the attention of a fellow whom she thought might be our Primary Guilty Party, the reluctant hero of Happy Valley.

Grundilla only wanted the best for her child.

She soon learned, though, that among the population of Xanadu is a very large cadre of celebrity impersonators, and she had met one of them.

That was not necessarily bad news! Grundilla was delighted to learn the target of her affection was very much like his hero and, quite significantly, not married.

They didn't really hit it off too well at first, but with some determined effort she was able to get him interested, if not in marriage, at least in Grundilla.

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Astute readers will recognize the name of Xanadu as the setting for Sheba's bedtime story. We're behind the scenes here, because of course the city of Xanadu is where Sheba's tale of Xanadu was filmed.

Grundilla's daughter, Lorelei Lee, had her own list of accomplishments to her credit. She had managed to land a job of her own and even picked up some extra simoleans once in a while as a swimsuit model.

You may have seen Lorelei's work as a swimsuit model.And if you haven't, of course you can click on the image to go to Lorelei's download topic!

Nevertheless, Lorelei's mother was concerned about her daughter's welfare. Grundilla was a single parent and didn't want her daughter to grow up in wild and crazy culture of Xanadu Studios without a father figure to guide her.

Nothing she did seemed to budge her celebrity-impersonator boyfriend from his solemn estate of confirmed bachelorhood, however. In desperation, she tried the ultimate ploy...

Grundilla got pregnant.

... she managed to get knocked up, with grand but perhaps foolish hope that this would result in her boyfriend Doing The Right Thing.

Ah, but the space next to her is empty! Where is her Captain Hero?

It turns out that her beautiful daughter was more precocious than she had counted on!

Grundilla isn't the only one who was interested.

Even as Grundilla was unwittingly nurturing a newborn, her firstborn was putting the moves on her boyfriend!

It turns out that in his quest to perfect his role, this celebrity impersonator also mimicked the darker side of his chosen hero. That is, when approached by an attractive teenager, and unencumbered by the tempering influence that Sheba had on his icon, he tumbled like a ton of bricks.

Perhaps due to some unidentified genetic imperative, Lorelei followed her mother's lead in falling for this ne'er-do-well.

Lorelei fell in love.

She enticed him by modeling the bikini that had propelled her to a minor amount of fame in the region, showing off the dance moves that got her the contract in the first place.

Dancing her way to fame and fortune.

Unbeknowst to her mother, Lorelei pushed this relationship to the limits. The next day, she waited for Grundilla to go to work and then lead him into the bedroom. There, she experienced far more than her First Kiss.

A kiss is still a kiss...What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gosling! Erm... something like that, anywho.

Grundilla continued on, unaware of her daughter's affection for her boyfriend, and equally unaware that she was not the first and probably not the last to try the Baby Ploy as means of dragging him to the altar.

She wanted to get Lorelei into private school, hoping of course that the snooty school might help round off Lorelei's rough edges. So she called headmaster BJ Ryan and invited him over for dinner.

Grundilla's luck was, at least, consistent. While she was showing the headmaster around her modest home, she went into labor!

Grundilla went into labor while showing the house to the headmaster.Lorelei was just arriving home from work when this happened.

Suddenly instead of touring the prospective student's home, BJ Ryan found himself in the role of birth coach. He performed admirably in that endeavor, and soon Grundilla gave birth to a baby girl whom she named, aptly, Gypsy Rose.

Grundilla was so embarrassed by this happenstance that she handed the new baby to her daughter and ran off to hide in the bathroom.

The headmaster was smitten with baby Gypsy Rose, but not with the home.

Headmaster BJ was quite taken with the new infant; however, his tour interrupted, he was most unimpressed with Grundilla's home and refused to allow Lorelei entrance into the private school.

Grundilla was crestfallen. Lorelei was heartbroken. But both would soon recover by immersing themselves in their respective interests.

As sims toddlers tend to do, Gypsy Rose turned out to be quite adorable.

Gypsy Rose Lee, Baby Extraordinaire

She did indeed attract the adoration of her father, who stopped by to visit her daily. He kept her happily snuggled and tickled, and even taught her some of her essential toddler skills.

But there was still no engagement ring in sight. Grundilla decided to pull out all the stops. If one baby was enough to keep him coming around each day, perhaps another would entice him to cough up the sparkly gravel.

If she couldn't have a husband, at least he was spending a lot of time at their house. Besides that, Grundilla discovered that she enjoyed having children! She also enjoyed the paid days off while she was pregnant!

She did it again.

So, throwing caution to the winds and her diaphragm out the window, she did it again.

Her fourth pregnancy was a happy time. When the children were asleep, she found other ways to keep him amused.

All the while, Grundilla was under the impression that she was keeping her children fooled about her nocturnal living room liaisons with her boyfriend. 'Twere a foolish notion. Teens are more observant than their parents give them credit for.

One day Lorelei proved this point with a bit of mischief of her own. She surprised her mother with a painting of her in her evening garb.

Don't let the innocent grin fool ya.

That rather blew the lid off of Grundilla's subterfuge. Lorelei escalated the mischief by adopting her mother's style of dress around the house, much to the amusement of baby Gypsy Rose.

Lorelei followed in her mother's footsteps.

Acknowledging that her teenager was hopelessly beyond her control, Grundilla gave in. By the time baby Jamie had grown to toddlerhood, they were saving a lot of wear and tear on their glad rags.

As one might expect, the children were crushed by the loss of their mother.

The loss of her mother was especially hard on baby Gypsy.

Lorelei, still a teenager who had hopes of going to college one day, suddenly found herself alone with three babies. She was despondent and, try though she might, the little ones seemed to be unconsolable in their grief.

There was only one bright moment when the insurance company called. Their mother had left them a considerable inheritance.

Grundilla left a sizeable inheritance to help her children.

For a moment, Lorelei considered asking the babies' father to take them in, but then realized that if her mother had failed to tie him down, she had no hope of doing so.

It took a lot of cuddling and several stories from mom's favorite story book, but eventually she got the babies settled down for the night. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and, even though tears would occasionally drip on her paper, scratched out a budget for their tiny family.

It was enough. They could do this. They would survive. They could make it on their own!

This seems like a good spot to pause and explain how Circe's Children came to be.

It all started when I made the bikini that Lorelei was wearing. I needed a teen to model it and, instead of just having one of the many existing teen girls in Happy Valley put on the silly thing, created a new character to stuff into the outfit.

Since the game won't let you create a household with just one teen in it, Grundilla was born. The game rolled her up. She looked pretty nice as she was so I just left her alone and planted the family out across river from the movie studios in Xanadu.

Then, quite predictably, I got interested in the new characters and wanted to play with them. I needed to build them a house so I could make a screen shot of Lorelei in her shiny new chain bikini.

Just as with the Happy Valley High School, I couldn't bring myself to just build a shell to serve as a backdrop. I had to build a whole house and furnish it with stuff the family could afford.

I'd already decided that this family would have to make it on their own, so I built a very modest house with their $20,000 seed money.

That got me hooked on the family, of course. I wanted to see how they fared in life.

Grundilla was a Family sim; I wanted a motherly mother. She was really stuck on meeting some guy, falling in love, and having a baby. I decided the first unmarried guy to wander by would be her victim.

So then, as fate (or Circe) would have it, the first fool to wander onto the scene was one of the Greg impersonators who hang out in Xanadu. The tale grew from there.

At the same time, there has been considerable discussion in the Hullabaloo about the wonders of letting sims grow old and die. I was curious enough to give it a try, but decided that if I'm going to let one of my favorite sims pass on, there ought to be an interesting situation left behind in the aftermath.

The Lee family were the obvious victims, and thus were created the ill-fated orphans, Circe's Children.

I think allowing them to grow old adds depth to a story, and starting from scratch, as most of mine do, makes the game far more interesting. I get really bored with rich Sims :lol unless I have a plan for how they will spend their money.